Tech Works: How to Get Promoted without Becoming a Manager
Not everyone wants to become a manager. Not everyone should be a manager. There should be a way to grow your career within an organization without having to manage a team. Sure, tech giants tend to have a well-defined path for senior engineers, but what about the rest of companies? You know, those more traditional organizations that are more likely to be hiring right now?
And how do you have a say and grow your influence in an organization without having to manage people?
As companies scale, they must find ways to retain technical talent. Google famously pays loads to successful individual contributors because they don’t believe engineering excellence automatically translates into successful leadership.
Accidental tech companies — like banks, telecommunications and health care organizations — are still reckoning with how to build a technical hierarchy past the first five to seven years of an employee’s career, past the role of senior software engineer. This is weird because the vast majority of tech roles are at non-tech companies. Which leaves these non-tech companies struggling to attract and retain senior engineering talent.
Enter the staff engineer.
Read on for how to follow this road less traveled, which means leading without managing, where you can build and influence technology at global scale.
What Is a Staff Engineer, Anyway?
Outside of Big Tech, the pathway to and benefits from the staff engineer track are murky at best.
Loiane Groner has spent the last 13 years building a career in technology at Citibank, where she is currently the vice president of software development. She gave a talk at last year’s QCon London about how to succeed in the technical path at non-tech companies — and how to stay off the management fast track.
By the simplest definition, a staff engineer is a senior, individual contributor (IC). The job does not involve managing a team directly. It’s a sociotechnical and strategic role that helps drive business goals forward via technical decisions. The staff engineer ladder begins above senior software engineer and comes with both a higher salary and more responsibilities.
The StaffEng Project is a series of staff engineer stories that make up both a book and a website by Will Larson, CTO at Carta. These staff-plus roles typically follow a similar path:
- Staff engineer.
- Senior staff engineer.
- Principal engineer.
- Distinguished engineer.
- Fellow engineer.
Typically the distinguished and fellow engineers are still only found in Big Tech. In contrast with the engineering management career path, the staff-plus route and role descriptions widely vary by company. But that can be part of the fun of the job.
“What exactly is in a job description for a staff-plus engineer? Sometimes I like to joke with my colleagues at work that I don’t know what my title is anymore,” Groner said, reflecting on her previous senior staff engineering roles.
“One day, I’m helping with architecture, the other day, I’m helping define the strategy for the long term. The next day, I’m helping the team to resolve a big production issue. The next day, I have a completely different task. Some days, I have no idea what my job title will be based on the tasks that I’m performing that day.”
“The Staff Engineer’s Path” by Tanya Reilly outlines three key pillars general to staff engineer roles:
- Big picture thinking. Unlike team leads, whose decisions have impact on that team, a staff engineer is making decisions that can potentially have impact on the whole organization, like choosing its cloud provider. These projects, like cloud migrations or decommissioning chunks of software, can take years to complete.
- Project execution. At a more complex level, Groner said, you’re sometimes doing work that nobody wants to do. These projects usually include cross-company stakeholders and require some political capital.
- Leveling up. While you don’t have direct reports, there’s an expectation that you will teach, mentor and influence colleagues as a role model.
What connects these three pillars? They typically have cross-organizational impact and require significant technical knowledge and experience.
What Does a Staff-Plus Engineer Do?
Beyond this, “your work as a staff engineer needs to be important for the company,” Groner said. This doesn’t always mean working with the shiny-shiny. And your special projects might go unseen, she added.
“These important tasks might involve gathering data that doesn’t exist, going through old documents, combing through code that was written 10 years ago that nobody has touched.”
In these times of trying to do more with less, a staff-plus engineer is often focusing on automation or could work with the platform engineering team to create more shared services and golden paths. The staff engineer is often making cost-benefit decisions.
If you’re in this role, you often decide the next ticketing tool or process and are involved in continuous integration endeavors. In more regulated industries, you may be looking at ways to do continuous deployment at a lower level, in the developer or QA environment.
If you are working in non-tech companies, besides the technical knowledge that you bring to the table, Groner said, you usually have to have vertical knowledge and domain expertise, too.
Also, if you’re the first of your organization in this kind of role, part of your job may be documenting and communicating what your job entails. This is a way of not only making it easier for you to leave a mark but also a way to help your company retain tech talent.
While these roles are much more technical, both managers and staff engineers share in the need to develop core skills:
- Communication.
- Influence.
- Teamwork.
- Delegation.
- Time management and prioritization.
- Mentoring and coaching.
- Ability to disagree.
- Emotional intelligence.
Especially in non-technical organizations, the transition from senior software engineer to staff engineer can be challenging. Always remember, just because you aren’t a team leader, doesn’t mean you aren’t influencing change.
“You help decide tools that will be adopted at an organizational level, define processes as best practices for the engineering team and how to adopt them,” Groner said. “You can influence the company at the global level.”
And be sure to check in that you are happy with the path you’re on. As Groner said, “If you want to make sure that you’re making progress toward your career, compare yourself with you from yesterday. This way, you’re going to be able to see if you are indeed on the right path, or if there is anything that you have to change.”
How to Become a Staff Engineer
If you’re reading this column, you are likely either a company that is losing senior technical staff or perhaps you’re five years into your engineering career and trying to figure out your next move.
“While there are a lot of alarm signals, like lack of learning opportunities, no clear path or lots of red tape, any IC that feels underutilized and having limited impact for a sustained period of time should be evaluating whether it’s time to have a jump to other opportunities,” Andrea Della Corte, vice president of engineering at the fintech company Curve, told The New Stack.
These job-move triggers can include “no opportunities to drive significant projects and/or impact the company’s strategic direction,” said Della Corte, who is also chief interviewing officer at Tech Interview Coaching.
It could also be that you’ve grown stagnant because the only way up is to management.
“If you’re that individual contributor, you need to make sure you’re working for a company that values and has that career path,” John Colgrove, founder and chief visionary officer of Pure Storage, told The New Stack. “From a company standpoint, as a leader of a company, you have to ask yourself: Do I really want my absolutely best individual contributors to stop doing what they’re doing and go into management, where they may only be average?”
As a company, you’ve invested in your engineering staff, but only up to a certain level. You’re risking talent because you haven’t established a non-managerial way to promote — yet.
“The greatest engineers can build the most fantastic products for you. Why do you want them to stop being engineers?” Colgrove asked.
There are some ways staff engineers offer better perspective than managers, he added: “Senior individual contributors are much, much better when you’re having a discussion around a policy, or a way of doing things and bringing the mindset of the early-in-career people than the senior executives.”
When establishing a staff engineering role, there are certain qualities you need to look for. Being a subject matter expert in a technical domain or the company vertical is very valuable, Della Corte said, as well as in-demand technical domains like cybersecurity and machine learning.
“This level of technical contribution enables them to remain central to the technological advancement of their organizations while enjoying the autonomy and challenges of their specialized field,” he said, which is an important way to retain tech talent.
A good candidate for the staff engineer track, Della Corte continued, aligns with your company mission, can deliver great work at high urgency, and exhibits natural leadership skills. Again, not because they will be managing people directly, but because this role is all about influence.
ICs have to be treated every bit as much like leaders, Colgrove emphasized. That means, they should be treated with the same respect as the managers. For instance, if your organization hosts a company-wide leadership summit, your individual contributors should be included, too.
The ‘Manager-IC Pendulum’
A lot of organizations make the mistake of simply taking an individual contributor and putting a manager’s hat on them. Usually this hat reads: Tech Lead.
“They stop writing code. They stop doing technical work. Over time, this leads to decreased employability, and it leads to a lot of anxiety on the part of the manager who knows that they’re a little bit trapped in that role,” said Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO at Honeycomb.io, at 2023’s QCon Plus.
This is an assumed one-way trip to manager, she added, which leads to more money and influence. The assumption, she said, is “this is really the only chance you get for career progression. That the best engineers make the best managers. This is all crap.”
It doesn’t have to be either/or.
This isn’t fair to the team, because this isn’t someone who feels naturally called to a leadership role, and who might not have the necessary qualities. It’s also not fair if you’re the newly promoted tech lead, Majors said, because while “you deserve to have career advancement,” you shouldn’t be locked into the management track for the rest of your career, losing technical experience.
But if you have a broader set of sociotechnical skills, you may be drawn to both the IC and management roles. That’s another option open to you. Majors advocated for what she referred to as the manager-individual contributor pendulum, which can earn “immense depth and breadth of experience” by going back and forth between roles.
The best line managers, she argued, should have already achieved senior engineer status, when they’ve achieved a solid foundation of technical skills. But don’t be afraid to be a hands-on manager, she urged.
“Keeping those skills relatively fresh gives you unimpeachable credibility, helps you empathize with your team,” Majors said. “It gives you a good gut feeling for where their actual pain is. It keeps you maximally employable, preserves your options.
“You can’t really debug sociotechnical systems, or tune them or improve processes or resolve conflicts unless you have those skill sets.”
On the flip side, by dipping your toe into management, you are more likely to gain the necessary network to then be able to influence technical strategy when you return to an IC role.
“There’s no substitute for management when it comes to really connecting business problems to technical outcomes — understanding what motivates people,” Majors said.
Even though it isn’t an established managerial role, a staff-plus engineer must be savvy at influencing the organization.
Whatever technical career path you follow, just remember that you can always change course. Even Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, got off the leadership ladder of his own company to find a new path from CTO to individual contributor: “The fact that I’ve been more engaged and more excited is a sign that this was the right choice for me.”
Good luck finding the right choice for you!
Heather Joslyn contributed to this article.
